The Brazilian modernization and our political thought

Abstract

This text is a preliminary attempt to explain the democratic deficit of the Brazilian political thought as a consequence of a leading and permanent idea present in the modernizing imagination of our political and intellectual elite: the rupture with the past. At the time of independence, that implied the tradition’s oblivion – a tradition created in the last three centuries by the language of affects – and the Brazil’s synchronization with the experience of the hegemonic models of modernity, fashioned by the languages of reason and interests. This imperative of rupture became a shared premise in the reflection of subsequent elites, political or intellectuals, and applied both to the more distant past and to the immediately preceding periods. Our hostility to the past and to tradition – and the knowledge’s lack of the democratic potential present in the affect’s language – crystallized a heavy intellectual heritage, hardly perceptible: the intellectual indifference before the sacrifice of the people, of generations and generations of Brazilians with their lives shaped by the language of affects, in the name of a future modern society, guided by the languages of reason ant interests.